Fridays for the future, everyday

La Conner students attended their classes last Friday. That’s not news. Better had they made news by taking to the streets and demanding their elders make news by seriously acting on the dire condition our planet is in. Maybe next time La Conner students will be a part of pushing adults past talking to taking significant action on climate change.

Students in 125 countries and 1,000 locations, including Bellingham, Friday Harbor and, of course, Seattle, did march last Friday. They are following the lead of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who has been protesting on Fridays in Sweden since September. Now she is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, in the U.S, it was another week of catastrophic weather as a bomb cyclone exploded in the great plains. Blizzards were the first story. Flooding is the follow up disaster.

The bad weather moved east, turning into tornadoes in Michigan March 14. Four. At winter’s end, another first for the record books.

At the start of a month, it was a rare EF4 twister: “about six are reported a year, according to USTornadoes.com, which said they leave ‘total destruction in their wake.’” The Alabama death toll was 23.

Here, we will soon worry about the coming wildfire season. There will be no disputing the smoke. The troubling fact is that air in Seattle at the height of Canadian wildfires last summer was worse than in Beijing.

Last Friday the kids’ point was that we need to act. We need our kids to shame and goad us and lead us into action as if their lives depended on it.

Their lives do, as do ours.

Now is the time for the slogan to be “all lives matter.” The planet will survive with us or without us. Our extinction could be slow, lifetimes away. But the slow descent into a death spiral, not the dramatic crashing of a Boeing 737 Max jet, is the result of the same decades of knowing the facts and refusing to act in the best interests of our children and other living things.

The choice is always ours. The question always is, are we willing to pay for it?

The future belongs to the kids. Are we going to tell them they won’t get there?

What do you say, La Conner students? What do any of us who will live in the future say?

As young people say, just asking.